A good friend of mine recently got in contact to ask my professional opinion on something for a book he was writing. He asked me how much a petabyte of storage would cost today and whether I thought it would affordable for an individual. Both parts of the question are interesting in their own way.
How much would a petabyte of …

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1200lbs is not that much it is about the same as a 150 gallon fish tank (us gallons), I wouldn't put it in the middle of the living room but perfectly feasible for a house I have seen bigger fishtanks on would floors in Chicago basement would be fine, but yeah cooling and power consumption might be a problem, that said if I were dirty filthy rich, it might be fun to try, just because.

what if those google glasses take off and everyone walks around with tiny cameras in their glasess? It would awesome to store all that video. That would take up a fair bit over the years wouldn't it? I realise google would want the data itself and not let us download our own copies, it was just an example

I suppose what I am trying to say, badly, is over the past 30 years we have started using technology in ways we could barely concieve off back then, what is to suggest that that is going to change?

You forgot the freetard community....

...will always demand ever increasing storage for their illicit media - most of which will never be watched or listened to. You give a freetard a petabyte, they will fill it whenever they get a chance. That will be in between rants against Windows 8 in favour of the freetard operating system of choice - Linux. I know one such person who already has filled over 1/10th of that storage - he's got 40 x 3tb disks and has dowloaded 4000 uncompressed bluray rips onto them. It's pathetic.

4 of these loaded out with 4TB drives would put you at just less than 1PB Raw in 16U make it 5 of em to put you fairly well over as each holds about 240TB RAW. Not sure if they offer 4TB yet we ordered ours with 2TB and 3TB disks.

Or, barring that, storage will grow with perceived need as well. Eventually media enthusiasts will insist on nothing less than seven-point-one channel lossless audio and 8-to-16k video, or biometric systems will want even higher-resolution thumb- and eye-prints, or who knows what. A lot of this stuff will depend on throughput as well, but that will evolve alongside the average required capacity. Remember when 640k should have been enough for anyone? You're basically suggesting the same thing there, 30 years on.

Classic

There isn't enough porn in the world.

I would be more worried about what kind of nutter wants home storage of a petabyte. You have to seriously horde everything to need it surely? Even a hardened downloader would struggle passed 10 - 20 TB?

Surely? thinking logically it would be cooling and power that would be the killer, your average house electrics would have to be rewired to allow the bigger leech of power? Granted I am no electrician but surely a 4 way 13amp fuse won't cut it. :)

Still I would like to see any stupid footballer who likes downloading to cough up the dough and try it.

Tape FTW

Well, Dell do a 42U tape library (the ML6030), which can hold 409 tapes.

Currently they're only listing it having LTO5, but I'm sure it'll be an easy upgrade to LTO6, which have a native capacity of 2500Mb and for 1Pb you'll need about 420 tapes, factor in a bit of redundancy and two tape libraries should do it, co-incidentally doubling your data rate!

However, it not got a price listed, but I'm sure el reg can get a ball park figure for a couple of these, and as the tapes are 'only' £70 each, it'll cost about £30k for the tapes.

11.4 years of 24x7 hidef video

Assuming bluray-ish quality of 10GB/hour. But people need to sleep, and maybe go to work once in a while to earn the money to keep this petabyte array running, so maybe only 4 hours a day to watch?? That means you have enough video for almost 70 years.

Don't overcomplicate matters...

...the question relates to 1PB of storage and that is all. There is no requirement for on-line storage (in the "old" meaning of the term, i.e immediately accessible). Arrangements that require physical loading of the medium are therefore perfectly acceptable. Tape has already been hinted at but can't compete with disk. Do disk it on disk then. They don't need to be mounted - use them in one of the bare drive USB interfaces (e.g. this one) and stored in the cheap silicon cases when not in use.

Power requirements are negligible since at any one time only one or two drives are connected. As for space, not very much really - I have a couple of 6ft tall bookcases here that each provide around 180" of shelf space. Since hard drives are small compared to many books you could effectively double that or more by inserting additional shelves in the same space - those two bookcases would hold at least 500 drives even in cases. If you wanted redundancy you could achieve this by designating every e.g. tenth drive as parity for the preceding nine, effectively giving you an off-line RAID 40 array. You would of course need a second adapter (one for the data drive, one for the parity) but that costs bugger all in the grand scheme of things.

Cost is highly dependent on the cost of the drives. Last time I looked the cost/GB sweet spot was 2TB for £60. 600 of those (the extra 100 for parity and spares) would be £36,000 retail but I'd imagine you could get a reasonable discount ordering hundreds of drives at once so I've venture the low thirty thousands for the whole set up. Maybe not what the asker had in mind and yes if would be cumbersome to retrieve a single photo or word document, but emminently practical for many archival kind of tasks. Going to a bookshelf, pulling out one drive, and dropping it in the reader is no big deal even for a single feature film - it's not really much different to loading a DVD is it?

In short then, it is entirely practical approached in the right way. You'd need deep pockets or to highly value your data, but it isn't beyond the realms of the average guy if he regards it as enough of a priority.

Re: Don't overcomplicate matters...

it isn't beyond the realms of the average guy if he regards it as enough of a priority

Technically maybe, but that'd have to be a pretty freaking high priority. You're talking about dumping more money into hard drives than most people are willing/able to spend on their cars. A lot of HOUSES don't even cost that much (small ones, granted, but still....).

Re: Don't overcomplicate matters...

Technically maybe, but that'd have to be a pretty freaking high priority. You're talking about dumping more money into hard drives than most people are willing/able to spend on their cars. A lot of HOUSES don't even cost that much (small ones, granted, but still....).

Exactly. Don't get me wrong, this is chunky money, but as I said it is is enough of a priority it's doable for most people in skilled occupations at least. If £30,000 seems too much to drop in one go amortize the cost over a period. A "library" approach as I envisioned above doesn't require you to go out and buy all the units at once - there's nothing to stop them accumulating over time. Buy two of those drives every week and after five years you have your 1PB.

Sure, £120 a week, week in, week out is still chunky money, but I suspect most professionals here could afford it if they wanted too. That doesn't mean they wouldn't have to make sacrifices elsewhere, so it comes down to how much of priority it really is.

As of 2009 Blackblaze was able to build a PB SAN for $117,000. They don't sell them (at least not as far as I know), but they do have the a blog describing in detail how they were built. It takes 15 4U servers to do it. I don't know the exact numbers, but I'm guessing that the weight of the rack would be pretty close to my deep freeze when it's fully loaded with meat. If I'm right (I may not be-I can't be bothered to do the math to figure out the weight of either right now) then falling through the floor wouldn't be a problem. Powering it would be an expensive proposition though. Such a setup would just about triple my electrical bill, and cooling the rig could well be an insurmountable problem in a home.

Then again a possible solution to the power and cooling problem would be to move to a nice cold climate and use your petabyte of personal storage as a furnace. Make that thing do double duty.

1Pb of disk?

99.9% will never be accessed or only read occasionally.

If you don't mind waiting a few minutes for access, then tape would be cheaper. If you're impatient then a Neo8000 tape library would draw less than 300W, hold almost 2Pb (raw) and give you access to your file in about 30 seconds for about 1/10 the price of the same amount of disk.